


in rest, in gentle deaths

by ceraunos



Category: Trust (TV 2018)
Genre: Drug Use, Lucid Dreaming, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, an over indulgence of commas and descriptors
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-18 11:30:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29733228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ceraunos/pseuds/ceraunos
Summary: With his eyes closed, the weight of August sun heavy and pulling at his limbs down into the upholstery, the street below feels distant, unreachable.‘Ciao,’Primo says it like it costs him nothing, like Paul will give everything to have him him say it again, this time against his skin.
Relationships: John Paul Getty III/Primo Nizzuto
Comments: 14
Kudos: 23





	1. rome - paul

With his eyes closed, the weight of August sun heavy and pulling at his limbs down into the upholstery, the street below feels distant, unreachable. The dying breeze that bats languorously at the net curtain twirled around Paul’s outstretched fingers tastes as if it could have come all the way from the ocean, the salt in it bitter like the sweat pooling at the base of his neck.

It’s hardly a surprise to find Primo watching him from the doorway, leaning against the frame as if he’s not sure whether to stay or go. There’s something sharp in his eyes like glass as Paul’s gaze slides past them, but he forgets it almost as soon as he notices.

‘Ciao,’ Paul says, rolling the sound through his tongue with a deliberately American bend just to watch Primo scowl.

‘ _Ciao,’_ Primo says it like it costs him nothing, like Paul will give everything to have him him say it again, this time against his skin.

The heat is sticky, swallowing him between cushions Primo would never buy that are scattered around him. His shirt pulls at his shoulders as he stretches, arches out of the heat, thin fabric taut where purplish bruises draw an indistinct line from collarbone to collarbone. There’s the shape of Primo’s teeth pressed into one of them like bullet wounds or pearls.

There’s a strange intimacy to the way Primo is staring, like he’s trying to find some fracture of the universe in the line of skin between Paul’s jeans and his shirt. Paul traces it with his finger and remembers the shape of a statue in his Grandfather’s house he’d pressed his cheek against as a child, the marble cool like silk against restless touch.

Primo doesn’t look away as he pushes himself off the doorframe, closing the distance between them like a coil. There’s a very small patch of sunburn on his nose, peeling, Paul notices, and then stops noticing as Primo wraps a hand around his ankle to sink into the cushions between his legs and kisses him.

Primo kisses like he’s trying to escape, like the only way he can is found in the taste of Paul’s teeth under his tongue, pushing him down, pushing him back. Paul’s hand finds the fabric of Primo’s collar, fingers twisting in with the ends of Primo’s hair that’s starting to curl in the heat and clings on.

Paul doesn’t exist when Primo kisses him; only colours and shapes and thoughts of Paul that take form and dissolve and reform under the hard lines of Primo’s fingers. Primo swipes a thumb smudged with gun oil over Paul’s lip before he sits back, something of a smile in the way he watches Paul’s tongue flick out to taste it.

‘ _Ho qualcosa._ For you _.’_

 _‘Per me?’_ Paul asks like he always does, innocence drawn around him as if it’s the first time.

Sometimes Primo will catch his wrist before he reaches for it, making him still until Paul closes his eyes for him, until the darkness tastes like Primo’s skin again. Sometimes he’ll hold the small white packet between the tips of his fingers, an eyebrow raised as if it’s easy for Paul to touch and Paul will laugh, diving forward, until they’re balancing, both of them together, on the edge of a precipice waiting to see who’ll topple first, Paul’s fingers stretching into Primo’s palm arched towards the sky.

This time Primo lets him lean forward to run a hand along his thigh to dip into his pocket, creasing the thin fabric under wandering fingers, soaking in the way Primo shivers, alert. The first hit is like drowning, Primo’s fingers back in his hair as he draws Paul’s thumb and forefinger to his teeth to lick the salt-taste from them, tapping more powder into the hollow of his throat and inhaling, strands of his hair sticking to Paul’s lips.

Paul has never liked the ocean, the way it crests and dips and carries on, but as Primo carves into him his body feels like the breaker in a storm, rolling over him until it swallows him, Paul tossed down and held under.

The colours of the room fade back to burnt gold as Paul drifts against Primo’s thigh, sweat cooling against his cheek as he draws the same patterns on Primo’s hip he’s brushing through his hair. Primo hums, like he’s saying nothing and perhaps everything as he passes the last of a cigarette to Paul, holding it against his lips as when Paul takes a drag and Paul closes his eyes like that, Primo’s fingers pressing lines into him like a kiss.

-

It gets dark fast in the mountains, Paul has learnt; Rome’s drawn-out sunsets burning hazy and amber gone almost as soon as they start, here. He opens his eyes, stretching out the fuzz of half-sleep, to Primo peering at him in the through the dark, laid out in the grass, a wine bottle between them.

‘ _Paol,’_ he says, and flicks the end of his cigarette away, leaning over to roll the wine bottle to him. The grainy dregs slosh around in the dark. _‘_ For you.’

There’s grass between Paul’s fingers tickling at his palm and Primo doesn’t look away as he swallows, his gaze like the wine bitter in Paul’s throat and he wonders, still lost a little in the burnt-gold of dreams, if Primo is thinking about what it might taste like on his skin.


	2. rome - primo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in a year of terrible weeks this has been The Worst Of Them, please enjoy some more happy boys existing somewhere without context as a result (god i wish that were me)

****

_Paol,_ he thinks without saying it, feeling the sound of it dissolve in his mouth like sugar and smoke. Paul glances over his shoulder at him, skin on fire with the dawn rising like a film set behind him, his toes curling around the edge of the roof as he balances, and Primo feels them curled into his thighs like it’s the only thing keeping him from falling. 

There’s the shadow of red smeared across Paul’s lips, a little on his teeth, a little high on his cheeks, stained from wine passed between them, Paul laid out between Primo’s ankles, or lipgloss found under fingers at the back of a bathroom sink making him taste sticky and sweet like strawberries. There’s a smudge, too, on the inside of Primo’s hipbone, where his trousers are tight against his skin, another high on his thigh to match the mark on Paul’s cheek.

Paul smiles like something might break if he doesn’t and takes another step away from Primo, slipping out of reach of Primo’s hand lazily stretched out against his calf. He drops the end of a cigarette and it spirals out of view, the ashes settling somewhere far below them both.

_If you fall, I’m not picking you up from down there._

‘Don’t worry,’ Paul calls into the sky, ‘I never fall.’

 _No,_ Primo thinks, _You never do_.

He’s not sure whose dream this is, anymore; too hazy and golden to be anything but Paul’s, but then again that’s the kind of thing Paul paints around everyone else, too: haze and gold. A bottle rolls along the roof, dropped from distracted fingers, and smashes.

Burnt tile is hard under his back, warming even as the heat from the evening before still seeps out of it, numbness stretching through him like a slow tide, tugging at nerves. If he closes his eyes there are stars behind his eyelids.

 _Touch me again,_ Primo thinks with Paul’s voice like a madness commanding him.

Paul is shadowed against the sun, creating patterns of colour where he sways to something Primo doesn’t hear. Paul dances further, suddenly small on the horizon where Rome comes up to swallow him, lost in the rooftops and ruins.

_Touch me, touch me, touch me._

It feels like burning when Paul does, leaning in to lick the cocaine from Primo’s hand, offered out and drawing him back, his lips like a prayer against his palm. Before he was old enough to take communion, Primo had received the blessings like all boys, with a palm to his crown and a cross in the sky. Paul’s hair knots around his fingers, catching him as he guides him to his lips.

Paul kisses like he’s waiting to be told how, like the world might end if Primo stops, so Primo doesn’t, just wraps a hand around his neck and takes and takes everything Paul lets him have and more.

There’s a simplicity in Paul’s skin, a kind of quietness in the desperation of lips that makes it easy to disappear into him, crowding himself around the edges where Paul ends like if he presses hard enough one of them will shatter.

There’s a high dying in his blood, a buzzing behind his eyelids, and when he drags Paul to his knees, the sun moves with him, painting figures stretching over each other, tangled until shadows on the roof become blurs of each other, an indescribable being. Paul doesn’t ask before he presses his mouth to Primo’s shoulder and arches into him, and he’s glad of it because he’s never been good at saying yes.

Paul hangs his feet off the edge of the roof as a thin trail of blood drips down his ankle while Primo pulls the last bottle glass out of his heal, something violent in the shape of it through Paul’s skin.

 _If you wore shoes,_ he thinks ambivalently, the languorous shape of Paul’s body draped against him enough to keep anything else at bay.

‘Yeah, yeah, man,’ Paul dismisses, and it sounds the most like him Primo knows.

Above them a bird circles like it’s waiting to see who’ll fall first, Paul’s hand drawing shapes in the shadows of Primo’s body, dancing between them and disappearing. He’s quiet in the aftermath of sex, hardly existing, and when Primo catches his hand with his own he blinks like he’s forgotten he’s there at all.

He doesn’t kiss him again but there’s a smear of blood between their thumbs, red amongst gold, and Primo can taste the wine in the air like strawberry sunshine.

-

_‘Paol,’ Primo says without anything to say after, the cigarette between his fingers half forgotten until Paul leans forward and puts it between his lips where it burns under stars, closer in the mountains than they are in Rome, like something hungry, desperate and dying. He wonders if Paul can taste the unexpected desire lingering in the smoke on his tongue like salt and swallows._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you might have noticed the chapter count has gone up... idk entirely where i'm going with this yet but there's definitely going to be more of it, i'm very taken with these dreamy boys x

**Author's Note:**

> i'm [ceraunos](https://ceraunos.tumblr.com/) on tumblr


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